Maths Rant

Rants about my love/hate relationship with Mathematics

Skip to content
  • Home
  • About the Author
  • Behind the Blog
  • Resources I love
Search

A-Levels

Catenaries in the Wild: From Spider Webs to Suspension Bridges

September 28, 2025October 14, 2025 / Shub Das / Leave a comment

There's something really nice when you look at the curve in all these photos. You can see it in the power lines, the arc of a chain, or if you've ever looked closely enough, a spider web. Part of the inspiration for this post goes to my chaotic but lovely FM Mechs class where we … Continue reading Catenaries in the Wild: From Spider Webs to Suspension Bridges

On Gaining Perspective

September 13, 2025September 28, 2025 / Shub Das / Leave a comment

Last year, I was rejected from Oxford. No interview, just a flat-out rejection for Maths. In hindsight, that became one of the biggest turning points in my life and gave me something much more valuable than I expected: perspective. You don't always get what you want. Sometimes, you don't even get what you might deserve. … Continue reading On Gaining Perspective

Exams, Burnout, and Finding Balance

August 11, 2025August 29, 2025 / Shub Das / 1 Comment

You can love a subject deeply and still feel like exams are destroying you. You can work hard, care a lot, and still walk out of an exam room feeling like you’ve failed. With A-Level Results Day just around the corner, I’ve been thinking a lot about how the pressure, the grades, and the system … Continue reading Exams, Burnout, and Finding Balance

Recent Posts: Maths Rant

On Writing Like a Human (Whatever That Means Now)

The Missing First Page of Most Maths Notes

On the Value of Mathematics in the Age of GenAI 

One Step at a Time

On the Joy of Problem Solving

Measuring by Eye

The Things I Cannot Control 

On Proving Things (in Maths, and in Life)

‘I don’t know. It’s a mystery.’

New Year, Old Confusion

A lot of maths notes feel like they start on page two. You see a theorem, then a proof, then an example. As I slowly but surely work through catching up on lectures and revision, one of the questions I’ve found myself sitting with is this: I often find it hard to come up with ideas for things, and that probably shows in the spontaneous nature of both the topics and timing of my posts. One of the things I didn’t expect to miss at university was doing school maths challenges. I think my first memory of cooking involves burning pasta. And at the time, I decided cooking simply wasn’t for me. People often say “focus on what you can control” as if it’s that’s simple and isolating variables in life is as easy as it is on a problem sheet. There are so many things behind the phrase “let it go.” History, attachment, hope, ego, fear, unprocessed conversations, futures that only existed in your head. Life isn’t a well posed problem. It’s chaos, entropy, with boundary conditions you didn’t choose. You can’t always cleanly separate the controllable from the uncontrollable when the thing you want sits right at that boundary. As much as this blog is about Maths, it’s also about rants. So here’s another one. One of the games I’ve been playing over the past few days is Celeste. If you’ve ever played it, you’ll know: you die. Constantly. Sometimes hundreds, thousands of times in a single chapter. Every January, without fail, I write the date down wrong at least once. That’s expected. But what’s less expected is that my brain occasionally still wants December to be the tenth month. Which, objectively, it isn’t, but linguistically? It kind of is.
Blog at WordPress.com.
  • Subscribe Subscribed
    • Maths Rant
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Maths Rant
    • Subscribe Subscribed
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...